MoonClerk powers recurring payments. Postmark powers their email.

A few years ago co-founders, Ryan Wood and Dodd Caldwell, were working on a project and they noticed non-profits didn’t have an easy way to set up recurring payments. Small nonprofits could use PayPal, but that was the only easy option for collecting monthly donations over a commitment period. PayPal worked, but it wasn’t ideal for most non-profits. After they had noticed this with non-profits, Ryan and Dodd looked around and saw many other industries didn’t have easy options for accepting recurring payments. This led them to create MoonClerk to help any business setup and manage monthly subscriptions.

Part of making recurring payments easy includes sending dynamic receipts and other emails on behalf of MoonClerk customers. The first step to unlocking this feature was to select an Email Service Provider. They initially chose Postmark, but the MoonClerk team wanted to find a provider who would let them set the from and reply-to address for each message with their customer's domains without the extra step of verifying those domains. With Postmark they could only send from domains or email addresses they had verified, and this created a barrier for some of their customers. After shopping for a bit, they initially decided to switch to Mandrill. “We liked the sending options Mandrill gave us up front, but over time our team hit a snag. Our customers would email us and ask if a certain message had been delivered, and if the message was more than a few days old, there was no way for us to know. As a small team, we needed to focus our time working on other features.”

Our customers would email us and ask if a certain message had been delivered, and if the message was more than a few days old, there was no way for us to know. As a small team, we needed to focus our time working on other features.

This snag caused the MoonClerk team to take a second look at Postmark. Their team loved that Postmark stores the text, HTML, and raw source for every message for 45 days. After switching back to Postmark, everyone on their team can quickly find emails their customers have sent and identify any issues, without having to comb through logs or add more work for their development team. They decided to set the Reply-To email addresses as their customer’s email addresses and use their customers’ names as the Senders Name. That proved to be a great workaround instead of not being able to set the From address as their customers’ email address.

Ryan said, “I’ve used Postmark before, and one of the things I love is it scales to each project. Even when I’ve only sent a few emails a day with other projects, I still got every feature Postmark offers. This makes it really easy to scale up email by purchasing extra credits as you need them, without having to worry about overages or paying for email we don’t use in a month on a big monthly plan.”

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